Centre for the Study of Culture and Society

Sections

Course 703: Modernity, Time, History

Instructor: Rochelle Pinto

Course requirements: student presentations and 2 short assignments

This course familiarizes readers with some approaches that examine the intersections of modernity, time and history as concepts, and structures of ordering and explanation. The initial weeks present contesting discussions within Europe over the origins, understanding and implications of modernity and the terms within which it has been discussed. Among these, discussions on how modernity produces and intersects with notions of time and history have been selected as a focus. These are drawn predominantly from critiques that trace the origins of specific and commonsensical usages of time and history as a consequence of modernity and of enlightenment thought. One point of focus in this course is to examine how modernity is reproduced and reconceptualized through its critique.

Subsequent weeks are devoted to examining the shape and implications of these debates in a colonial context, with specific reference to colonial India.

Students are required to complete the readings for each week before they come to class. By the last week, students are expected to have read Shahid Amin’s Event Memory Metaphor, and come to class with a review of the text in the light of the readings through the course.

Bernard Yack, ‘Imagining the Modern Age’, in The Fetishism of Modernities: Epochal Self-Consciousness in Contemporary Social and Political Thought, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997, pp. 17-40. Link found here

Bernard Yack, ‘Disentangling theory and practice in the modern World’ in The Fetishism of Modernities: Epochal Self-Consciousness in Contemporary Social and Political Thought, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997, pp. 119-136. Link found here

Sudipta Sen, ‘Semantics of History and Time in the Medieval Indo-Persianate culture of North India’ in Invoking the Past, Daud Ali ed., New Delhi ; Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 231-257. Link found here

Mikael Aktor, ‘Smrtis and Jatis: The Ritualisation of Time and the Continuity of the Past’, in Invoking the Past, Daud Ali ed., New Delhi ; Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 258-279. Link found here

Session 5: Foucault and history

Michel Foucault, ‘History’, from Order of Things : An Archaeology of Human Sciences, New York, Random House, 1973, pp. 367-73. Link found here

Udaya Kumar, Seeing and Reading: The Early Malayalam Novel and Some Questions of Visibility, in Early Novels in India, Meenakshi Mukherjee ed., Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2002, pp. 161-192. Link found here

Ashis Nandy, ‘History’s Forgotten Doubles’ in Ashis Nandy ed. The Romance of the State, and the fate of Dissent in the Tropics, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 83-109. Link found here